BiblioVault - Books about Feminist archaeology

The Domesticated Penis

How Womanhood Has Shaped Manhood

Loretta A. Cormier

University of Alabama Press, 2015

Demonstrates that not only natural selection but also female choice has played a key role in shaping male anatomy

The Domesticated Penis challenges long-held assumptions that, in the development of Homo sapiens, form follows function alone. In this fascinating exploration, Loretta A. Cormier and Sharyn R. Jones explain the critical contribution that conscious female selection has made to the attributes of the modern male phallus.

Synthesizing a wealth of robust scholarship from the fields of archaeology, cultural anthropology, evolutionary theory, and primatology, the authors successfully dismantle the orthodox view that each part of the human anatomy has followed a vector of development along which only changes and mutations that increased functional utility were retained and extended. Their research animates our understanding of human morphology with insights about how choices early females made shaped the male reproductive anatomy.

In crisp and droll prose, Cormier’s and Jones’s rigorous scholarship incorporates engaging examples and lore about the human phallus in a variety of foraging, agrarian, and contemporary cultures. By detailing how female selection in mating led directly to a matrix of anatomical attributes in the male, their findings illuminate how the penis also acquired a matrix of attributes of the imagination and mythical powers—powers to be assuaged, channeled, or deployed for building productive societies.

These analyses offer a highly persuasive alternative to moribund biological and behavioral assumptions about prehistoric alpha males as well as the distortions such assumptions give rise to in contemporary popular culture. In this anthropological tour de force, Cormier and Jones transcend reductive gender stereotypes and bring to our concepts of evolutional biomechanics an invigorating new balance and nuance.

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Household Chores and Household Choices

Theorizing the Domestic Sphere in Historical Archaeology

Edited by Kerri S. Barile and James C. Brandon

University of Alabama Press, 2004

Discusses the concepts of “home,” “house,” and “household” in past societies

Because archaeology seeks to understand past societies, the concepts of "home," "house," and "household" are important. Yet they can be the most elusive of ideas. Are they the space occupied by a nuclear family or by an extended one? Is it a built structure or the sum of its contents? Is it a shelter against the elements, a gendered space, or an ephemeral place tied to emotion? We somehow believe that the household is a basic unit of culture but have failed to develop a theory for understanding the diversity of households in the historic (and prehistoric) periods.

In an effort to clarify these questions, this volume examines a broad range of households—a Spanish colonial rancho along the Rio Grande, Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in Tennessee, plantations in South Carolina and the Bahamas, a Colorado coal camp, a frontier Arkansas farm, a Freedman's Town eventually swallowed by Dallas, and plantations across the South—to define and theorize domestic space. The essays devolve from many disciplines, but all approach households from an archaeological perspective, looking at landscape analysis, excavations, reanalyzed collections, or archival records. Together, the essays present a body of knowledge that takes the identification, analysis, and interpretation of households far beyond current conceptions.

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Native American Landscapes

An Engendered Perspective

Cheryl Claassen

University of Tennessee Press, 2016

This collection of essays focuses on what Cheryl Claassen terms the “multi-vocal” landscape—the idea that different groups and genders look upon the same natural features but perceive different meanings and potential in what they are seeing. Through ten chapters, various contributors showcase the ways in which native peoples see, and interact with, the natural world. At the heart of this book is the idea that Europeans associated nature with the feminine and saw the natural world as a passive frontier to be dominated. Native Americans, however, looked at landscape differently. They saw nature as a place in which to engage in complex negotiations between spirits and humans. This approach to nature cemented a relationship to the land based more on a partnership rather than subjugation.

These essays deepen our understanding of the interaction between native people and the land. While other books focus on the gendered gaze of European men upon the landscape, this collection emphasizes that native men and native women looked upon natural formations and constructed landscapes differently from one another, a difference in perception that is important for archaeologists and anthropologists to understand. While there have been advances toward admitting this more complex view in the rest of the world, Native American Landscapes is the first to focus on how native men and women viewed the world around them.

Native American Landscapes is organized by region, taking readers across the country from the rock shelters of the Cumberland Plateau, in the east, to the Mojave Desert and the Mexican Gulf Coast, then north to what is now British Columbia and farther west to Hawaii. Readers of this collection, through a study of creation myths, vision quests, fertility shrines, and other ritualized uses of landscape, will learn more about the land and about humans’ perception of our natural surroundings, which forms the bedrock of our present relationship with the natural world.

CHERYL CLAASSEN is professor of anthropology at Appalachian State University. She is the author or editor of six books on Native American prehistory, including Feasting with Shellfish in the Southern Ohio Valley; Shells, Rituals, and Beliefs in Archaic North America; and Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica.

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